Quote:
Originally Posted by
GophusMeau
Currently I use Oracle VirtualBox, can anyone recommend a good UNIX OS which will help me get started - that will be close to an AIX environment?
As an AIX SysAdmin for the last ~30 years i can tell you: nothing is even "close to AIX". Sorry to say that but to learn AIX you need AIX, nothing else. The best (and cheapest) you may try is to buy an old and out of support IBM machine where AIX is already installed and play with it. For instance, there is a
Model 44P-170 for ~ $$ 300. The system is approx. 15 years old, but the basics of AIX (nota bene: the
basics) haven't changed that much since then. Modern AIX systems (aka "p-Series") are targeted at the high-end segment in terms of robustness and reliability but they come at a price. To get a modern and supported hardware running AIX with all the licenses you need (and a HMC, ...) you face investments of $$ 50k upwards - not something you want to buy for dabbling around.
Fortunately, the way you come across you will have to learn a lot of general UNIX knowledge first anyways and for this purpose most modern systems are pretty equal. Here are a few things to learn which you can do on absolutely any system, regardless of it being a UNIX (HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris,AIX), FreeBSD, OpenBSD or any of the Linux-distributions afloat. (I suggest to stay away from OpenBSD, not because the system wouldn't serve the purpose but the people doing it are what i would call "open-source Ayatollahs" and like all fanatics enjoy killing the innocent.)
- how to read man pages
- file system mechanics, mounting/unmounting
- regular expressions and their different types (globs, BREs, EREs)
- filter tools: grep, sed, awk, join, paste, ...
- shell basics - notice that AIX uses Korn Shell (IMHO the better shell anyway), not bash, but it is good to be proficient in both
- basics of scripting
- UNIX process model, "background" and "foreground" jobs, multitasking, ....
I hope this helps.
bakunin